Miracles? How Can I Believe That?

Sixth Sunday in Course 2023

I suppose the most frequent question I’ve been asked since my ordination, and even before that, is “why after the years of prayer doesn’t God heal my physical problem?” Or it could be the sickness or injury of a friend or relative that is getting the prayer. “There’s so much suffering in the world, and especially my cousin’s. If there is a God, let Him cause a miracle to happen.” In other words, if you are God, give me physical proof.

Rather than point out how incredibly arrogant that last statement is, I’ll offer two maybe useful answers. The first is a suggestion to watch a 2003 Jim Carrey film titled “Bruce Almighty.” It answers a similar statement, “if I were God, this is how I’d respond to prayer.” The short film synopsis is “chaos results.”

My second answer asks the question, “why are there any miracles at all?” Remember that a miracle is an unexplained positive change that could not have happened due to any natural, physically explicable process. Here’s an example of one from Lourdes. It happened in 2008 and was accepted only ten years later after an exhaustive investigation by the International Medical Committee of Lourdes. “the French nun, Sister Bernadette Moriau, went on a pilgrimage to the Healing Waters of Lourdes. At the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes she partook in a blessing at the shrine, but admits that she never asked for a miracle. You see, by that stage she had been wheelchair-bound for almost three decades. She took morphine to control the pain caused by spinal complications. But she didn’t expect to be healed completely, and yet after the blessing things started to change in a big way.

“She recalls a warm sensation flooding her body during the blessing. A ‘healing sensation’ she calls it. Then, after returning to her room, she heard a voice tell her to take off her braces and get up. After 30 years of being paralyzed, Sister Bernadette got up and walked.” No more meds and no more equipment. God had healed her.

So here’s an answer to my question, “why are there any miracles at all?” In our arrogance, if today we weren’t hit upside the head with an occasional miracle like this, if our pride and arrogant half-baked understanding of God and the world weren’t challenged every so often, we might listen to stories about Jesus with a more cynical, unbelieving ear. Mark’s Gospel–and it’s not the only such story in Scripture–says that all the leper did was express faith in Christ. “If you will, you can make me clean.” And in Christ’s pity, He does what is unimaginable for a first-century Jew. He touches the man’s skin and says “I will; be made clean.” And then the next unimaginable event happens: the man’s skin heals immediately, straightway. What was gnarled, rotten is made whole, straight, ordered. A miracle. But, despite the command of Jesus, the healed leper does not seem to have gone to the Levitical priest. He realized that all Moses did in Torah was prescribe diagnosis by the priest, not healing. Jesus actually healed the man. So he went around everywhere telling everybody what Jesus had done. And, no doubt, even though Jesus had told the man exactly what Moses required, He got Himself into yet another place where the Pharisees could complain about His work.

The takeaway from this scene, I think, is twofold. First, the miracle stories in Scripture are believable, and made more so by miracles documented today all over the world, with Christians of all kinds and churches involved. Second, it may be true that no good deed goes unpunished, as the cynics say, but we must do the good anyway, because that’s what Jesus, our Lord and model, always did. Whatever we do, we must do to the glory of God.